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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Brain rewiring

Smartphones will be in the hands of half the population within six

years, Ofcom predicts.

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Welcome to the toilet-talking, midnight phone-junkie generation.

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We are all media junkies now.

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We Britons spend more than four hours a day watching television , the highest level of consumption for at least five years

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Which is probably good news given that there are 510 channels to choose from.

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We bought 9.55m television sets last year, fewer than in 2009, but twice the number sold back in 2002.

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Of those 9.55m sets nearly a third were larger than 33 inches.

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Let the boasting begin.

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Radio listening has never been greater either.

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A record 91.6% of us listen to at least 15 minutes in a week.

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Then there's internet use, up in 2010 by 17 minutes a day, to just over two hours a day.

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And then there's talking – well, on the telephone – which has become 20% more popular on the Ofcom measure since 2000.

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One might be forgiven for wondering how we fit it all in

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This wasn't what was supposed to happen.

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The rising popularity of digital technology was, so the theory went, intended to displace traditional media.

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But while Facebook may be so addictive, as Ofcom notes, that it takes up five times the amount of our time as the next most popular website.

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The impact of the internet is, if anything, economic.

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Piracy has hit recorded music sales – down 8.6% to £1.2bn

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And now DVDs, whose sales fell by 5.7% to £1bn, even with the help of the first half of the last part of Harry Potter.

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Newspaper sales are down, but online audiences are up.

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Overall our desire to consume media has never been greater.

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Ofcom, though, gives us some clues as to the secrets of the new British efficiency.

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So hopeless, for example, is our addiction to smartphones that it turns out that a fifth of adults are prepared to admit they use their iPhone or BlackBerry on the toilet.

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Nearly four in 10 of us will answer the phone if it wakes us while we are sleeping.

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We have become the generation that is comfortable consuming two media at once: answering emails while watching the television.

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So much, indeed, for British manners

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What the deluge of official data also shows is how we come to expect technological change.

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The faster-faster model of media and technology consumption is demonstrated by the fact that while it took 15 years for mobile phone ownership to reach half the population

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It is expected that internet-capable smartphones will reach the same proportion in just five years.

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It took 13 years for radio to reach half the population when the National Programme (today's Radio 4) came on the wireless

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10 years for colour television in the era of Pot Black, and, Ofcom estimates

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It will take about six years for the same to apply to Kindles and iPads.

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After all, 1.5m of these devices have already been sold in the UK

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Perhaps at some point the frantic pace of consumption and computing will stop

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But probably only after the last unwatched television programme has been deleted from the last Sky+ box.

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Which will be on at least 3D.

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We spend more time watching TV, logged on or communicating by phone as the pace of consumption accelerates.